Recognizing domination: recognition and power in Honneth’s critical theory

Abstract

Axel Honneth frames his contribution to the tradition of critical theory as an attempt to do justice to both the structures of social domination in contemporary Western societies and the practical resources for their overcoming. This paper assesses how well Honneth’s critical theory, which centers on the notion of the struggle for recognition, accomplishes the first of these two tasks. I argue that Honneth has yet to offer a fully satisfactory analysis of domination because his recognition model is unable to make sense of modes of subordination that function without producing any struggle.

Keywords:

• recognition
• subordination
• subjection
• critical theory
• Honneth

Acknowledgment

The author wishes to thank Clarissa Hayward for her thought‐provoking comments on a much earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. For criticisms of Honneth’s reliance on object‐relations psychoanalysis, see McNay (2008, pp. 132–148) and Whitebook (2001). Honneth defends his use of object‐relations theory in Honneth (2007c).

2. One could argue, as Rainer Forst suggested to me in conversation, that Butler is simply using the term subordination in a neutral sense, as a synonym for dependency. However, the term subordination has, in English, a decidedly negative connotation, and so it seems unlikely to me that it has this neutral meaning for Butler.

3. Similar questions are raised, though in a different way and with reference to the political question of the recognition of religious minorities, in Forst (2007).

4. For two very different arguments to this effect, see Markell (2003) and Oliver (2001).

5. Here Honneth offers what seems to me to be the very problematic example of praising a woman for being a good housewife. He suggests that such an act would not be credible to the woman because it appeals to a mode of evaluation that has been thoroughly discredited. It is not clear to me, however, that there is widespread, let alone universal, agreement on whether this being a good housewife is an appropriate term of praise. This is especially the case in the USA, though I suspect that, outside of academic and professional circles, the same could be said of Germany.